When producing castings and moldings, it is very common practice in industry to form a plurality of components within the same die, all of the components being removably attached to a gate (or tree). The components may be identical or may be of different shapes depending upon the nature of the operation.
Generally, the die casting or molding machine is operated at maximum capacity on a full automatic cycle. As long as the furnace attached to the casting or molding machine has molten material (metal or plastic) in the furnace, the die casting or molding machine will repetitively produce the desired gate without human intervention. Following each cycle, a gate consisting of sprue, runner, overflow and desired components is removed from the machine. The gate must be removed rapidly and the removal apparatus must be available for a subsequent removal in as little as 5 seconds to accommodate the rapid cycle of casting the gate.
In high volume production, the gate must be moved rapidly from the immediate vicinity of the die casting machine or molding to avoid an accumulation and jamming of the machine. Manual unloading is usually able to keep up with the production rate only with great difficulty. Often, the gates are merely ejected and allowed to slide down a chute. In these instances, the gates must subsequently be held or otherwise constrained to remove the desired components from the unusable parts of the gate. Robots have been used to unload the gate from the die and feed the gate to a "trim die" such as a vertical press to remove the components from the gate. Robot systems are very expensive and, consequently, are used only where production quantities are large enough to make the use of robots economically feasible. With large sized components, the components are frequently removed manually from the gate. If the gate has different types of components, the components are frequently sorted manually and like components are deposited in drums. The scrap material such as the runner, sprue and overflow are generally removed from the immediate work site, accumulated and subsequently returned to the furnace for remelt.
There is a need for a simple, inexpensive automatic device to attach to the die casting or molding machine to unload the gate, separate the components from the gate, convey the parts to separate containers and convey the scrap back to the furnace before the scrap cools to room temperature.